TC

Chaucer wrote that “time and tide wait for no man.” With apologies to the “father” of English literature, we say that time and money wait for no entrepreneur. The deadline for saving big money on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2018, which takes place on November 29-30, comes to an abrupt halt on Wednesday August 1 at 11:59 p.m. CEST — in just 48 hours. Right now, early-bird pricing tiers start at €595 including VAT. That’s a sweet deal because, depending on […]

Struggling against competition from Chinese smartphones, Samsung Electronics posted a lackluster second-quarter earnings report with its slowest profit growth in more than a year. On the bright side, the Korean tech giant said its semiconductor business is doing well. Operating profit rose 5.7% year-over-year to 14.9 trillion won (about $13.3 billion), representing Samsung Electronic’s slowest quarterly profit growth since the first quarter of 2017. Net income was 11 trillion won (about $9.8 billion), almost the same result Samsung posted in […]

When you think of “Firefox,” you probably think of something that looks like this: Or, perhaps, something like this: That logo (or some iteration between the two) has been the browser’s logo since it launched back in 2002. Its time for change, Mozilla says. In a blog post about “evolving the Firefox brand,” Mozilla Creative Director Tim Murray outlines the company’s thinking: Firefox isn’t just one browser now. With side projects like Firefox Rocket (the company’s browser for connections with […]

Google has hired Richard Marks, Sony’s Magic Lab head who was behind much of the company’s VR efforts, to a position in its Advanced Technology and Projects group, VentureBeat reports. Google confirmed the hire to TechCrunch, sending along a statement from ATAP Head Dan Kaufman. “ATAP is at the intersection of science and application where our goal is to solve significant problems and close the gap between what if and what is. We’re super excited about Richard joining the senior team […]

After the revelation that MoviePass borrowed $5 million to keep its service up and running last week, things aren’t looking good. MoviePass subscribers, myself included, were met on Monday with a blank screen where their choice of screening should be. Navigating around dozens of theaters only shows a message that “There are no more screenings at this theater today.” Twitter noticed too and people are starting to sound the death knell for the beleaguered monthly movie subscription service. Some MoviePass […]

As the economy has chugged along, so have retail sales, which last year capped their strongest year since 2014. Online sales have been especially brisk, growing 16 percent between 2016 and 2017 alone, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, which estimates that consumers spent $453.5 billion online last year. Of course, with every booming market comes supporting cast members that benefit. Such is the case with eight-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based Optoro, which itself just rang up $75 million in new funding. A logistics company, Optoro’s […]

Every artificial intelligence startup or corporate R&D lab has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to how humans annotate training data to teach algorithms what to look for. Whether its doctors assessing the size of cancer from a scan or drivers circling street signs in self-driving car footage, all this labeling has to happen somewhere. Often that means wasting six months and as much as a million dollars just developing a training data system. With nearly every type of […]

3D body scanning systems have hit the big time after years of stops and starts. Hot on the heels of Original Stitch’s Bodygram, another 3D scanner, 3DLOOK, has entered into the fray with a $1 million investment to measure bodies around the world. The founders, Vadim Rogovskiy, Ivan Makeev, and Alex Arapovd, created 3DLOOK when they found that they could measure a human body using just a smartphone. The team found that other solutions couldn’t let them measure fits with […]

Serverless, Inc came to the serverless game early, creating an open source framework for developers back in 2015. Today, they want to build on that earlier product to give developers more control over deployment and delivery of serverless applications. To that end, they announced a $10 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Ventures. They have now raised a total of $13 million, according to the company. The company also announced the release of the Serverless Platform, which include the […]